Friday, January 13, 2012

Build Day 7: End of Week 1

This is the mock up of our current design. A little explanation of the robot, the balls get spun up into the robot by the lowest black roller (the collector), than progress up into the elevator portion that will have belting wrapped around the two top rollers to lift the balls toward the shooter. The shooter and shooter hood haven't' been CADed because we are waiting on prototypes to finish so we know how our design ideas will work.

A huge amount of work still has to go in to this before it is ready to be built. But it's getting a lot closer. We're attempting to standardize as much of the robot as possible to allow for easy maintenance.

We were able to the test 3 improvements to our prototype systems today all with promising results. We adjusted the shooter prototype to be spinning at just shy of 3,000rpm. That gave us a good amount of velocity but we need to work on the shooter hood prototype so we can get the correct launch angles.

The ball collector had polycord bands and a second roller added to it, we we can test the elevator concept. We're hoping to be able to determine the ideal compression ratio for the ball before we start building the read robot.

The drive train had the wheel drops mounted and we tested going over the barrier but due to a failure in our chain puller we weren't able to finish. If anyone knows of a place to get a chain puller in Houston on a Saturday morning please let me know.

The controls team was able to get back data from our IR range finder that we will use in several places to automate our collector. We're looking to get all our sensor drivers finished by the middle of next week so we can start writing the actual control code.

The two systems we haven't begun to prototype yet are the bridge device and ball deflector. We have smart people thinking about both problems but if you have suggestions or ideas please let me know..

- Allen Gregory

"One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do." - Henry Ford